"beetling" poems
The ogre that I am, I sit in my man-cave.
It’s bathed in light from my TV and laptop.
Each is a portal to our ugly world.
Regulated crystal-city skyscrapers
Form Giant’s Causeways.
Aircraft eagle overhead
Reminding me of vultures
And 9\11.
Cars beetling about the suburbs,
Some Beetles, Ha Ha.
River highways cascading cars.
Ants rush everywhere,
A seething nest.
So many an ant,
Holding a conch to the ear,
Or staring mesmerised at that tiny screen.
Yoda fingers his phone…
And me I sit here,
Metamorphosing metaphors
For a while
Before I visit Facebook Land
Once again.
Paul Butters
Feb 17, 2016
Feb 17, 2016 at 5:40 AM UTC
Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
Never to bid good-bye
Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
Unmoved, unknowing
That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.
Why do you make me leave the house
And think for a breath it is you I see
At the end of the alley of bending boughs
Where so often at dusk you used to be;
Till in darkening dankness
The yawning blankness
Of the perspective sickens me!
You were she who abode
By those red-veined rocks far West,
You were the swan-necked one who rode
Along the beetling Beeny Crest,
And, reining nigh me,
Would muse and eye me,
While Life unrolled us its very best.
Why, then, latterly did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time’s renewal? We might have said,
“In this bright spring weather
We’ll visit together
Those places that once we visited.”
Well, well! All’s past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!
2k
Senlin, walking beside us, swings his arms
And turns his head to look at walls and trees.
The wind comes whistling from shrill stars of winter,
The lights are jewels, black roots freeze.
'Did I, then, stretch from the bitter earth like these,
Reaching upward with slow and rigid pain
To seek, in another air, myself again?'
(Immense and solitary in a desert of rocks
Behold a bewildered oak
With white clouds screaming through its leafy brain.)
'Or was I the single ant, or tinier thing,
That crept from the rocks of buried time
And dedicated its holy life to climb
From atom to beetling atom, jagged grain to grain,
Patiently out of the darkness we call sleep
Into a hollow gigantic world of light
Thinking the sky to be its destined shell,
Hoping to fit it well!--'
The city dissolves about us, and its walls
Are mountains of rock cruelly carved by wind.
Sand streams down their wasting sides, sand
Mounts upward slowly about them: foot and hand
We crawl and bleed among them! Is this Senlin?
In the desert of Senlin must we live and die?
We hear the decay of rocks, the crash of boulders,
Snarling of sand on sand. 'Senlin!' we cry.
'Senlin!' again . . . Our shadows revolve in silence
Under the soulless brilliance of blue sky.
Yet we would say: there are no rocks at all,
Nor desert of sand . . . here by a city wall
White lights jewell the evening, black roots freeze,
And Senlin turns his head to look at trees.
956
Myth says when one cupped hand whispers of a name
is when you feel the wind breathe out the same
from where you stand—brushing chimes—together as one.
I am writing this in a white broken lawn chair
watching the leaves die each way and still I think of you.
Cousin and I shared your secrets. I wondered, if that wind
wrestled you the same as my branches from wherever
you may float. Did they pick up and take off little by little—
showing bones beetling from dirt off your chest?
Did you death rattle over once more when hearing
of your daughters ache in the surrender of knowing
where she truly comes from, at all?
There are little wars inside my head. One particular scene
playing again after the ink has spread across like widescreen
wild fires and begin over your own spanish revival inside a boat.
Different men after men, different bags with different hair,
different waves and different birds. Different guns and
different embers. Different scars, even different ends.
And all of your many lost, different, children.
Dec 11, 2012
Dec 11, 2012 at 1:43 AM UTC
Dyslexia, mixed messages
Everything so confusing
Susceptible to misusing;
A 'B' becomes a 'D' instantaneously
And screws things up simultaneously.
A short trip from insanity to inanity.
Fiscal confuses with physical
Turning laudable into laughable
So quickly eyes can't disguise
Whether one means the skies
Or perhaps one means this guy's.
If read, confusion and contusion
Seem like quibbling over siblings
But things like read and read
Only different when they're said
Take un-signalled turns in the head
And instead come out backward,
Which should be spelled backword.
Muddling and confuddling resides
Issuing thundering broadsides,
Rendering and sundering any
Blundering inadept ineptitudes
Like some kind of garbled beatitudes.
Some take hostile attitudes.
Wheedling and wheeling away
Beetling and saying it wrong;
Maybe a song can be written
And some tongues can be bitten,
Taken aback by words taken back,
As the Raven said "Never more!"
Dec 24, 2016
Dec 24, 2016 at 4:18 AM UTC
Not a horseman, nor a coach,
The horses are down the high pitched coast;
Only a weak whip-like reproach
Made the horses run from their own ghost.
Down the hill, the horses flying
Into the deep like doomed pegasuses' *****
The neighs and waves are crying,
Replying the peaceful song of a fiendish siren.
Before the dark water turns to scarlet,
It paints a mad reflection of them horror haunted;
A demerited dark life-span mindset
That vanishes in the wild waves delighted.
Oct 6, 2019
Oct 6, 2019 at 11:52 AM UTC
Far in this den of flaring links
With jocund ships and dismal streets,
You know by heart those piled up heaps
Of low-browed, beetling roofs.
But for the miracles in store,
You would have felt a little sore.
As chilly bareness falls for snow
To make some fine excuse.
Although the feeble candle-light
Has latent echo, once you sigh
For dreary days, it's still alright
To be bereft of drip.
It changes tune, indeed. Your tune.
The one ghost hummed in gleaming room.
The one that fits ones homeward blue.
The substitute for gift.
At length the sudden knock you hear,
For all delight, and thrill, and cheer,
You'd hardly ***** with fingertip
For long-deserted door.
With dark brown curls and sparkling eyes
You meet a stranger, for demise
Is yet to catch you by surprise
With writing on a stone.
Too late to have your fate reversed,
Dream dwindles down into bedpost,
And pale, as though you've seen a ghost,
You scramble out of bed.
Mist loiters near the stirring cold-
It's all the wonders to behold.
The big prize turkey have been sold
In store around the bend.
Dec 19, 2017
Dec 19, 2017 at 3:58 PM UTC
TLACAELEL
My lord, your wives entreat you to carouse,
And tend a show of juggling acrobats.
MOTECUHZOMA
When work is done. Recall those sorcerers. Exit Servant.
Till concrete facts come in, abstractions must suffice.
Enter a Servant.
SERVANT
Your majesty, a humble fisherman
Brings news pertaining to these prodigies.
MOTECUHZOMA
Admit him. [Exit Servant.] Lord, when peons paint my way!
Enter the Fisherman and Servant. *He trails his hand
on the ground toward him, and kisses his ***** fingertips.*
FISHERMAN
O master, ruler, lord, great gentleman,
If witless lips which kiss the unswept earth
Be fit to thus accost an emperor,
Regard me, if it please your majesty.
TLACAELEL
Speak, boy. Sublime Motecuhzoma hears.
FISHERMAN
I come from Hellwood, at your southern shores,
Where this week past, upon a beetling bluff,
I glimpsed a buoyant, surging reef of hills
With twining towers carousing on the waves,
That seemed a transport for intruding rarities:
A fear which whisperings in the wind confirmed.
TLACAELEL
Ho, ** **
Was this the Spirit speaking, or the spirits?
Some extra mushrooms in your salad, sir?
FISHERMAN
Discard me if I lie! Hail, lords! All hail!
TLACAELEL
All hail and sleet and snow, and all things cold.
And chill reception from this wintry prince,
For I suspect you seek remuneration.
Nov 27, 2016
Nov 27, 2016 at 4:09 PM UTC